A Good Death and Social Nihilism

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All the book learnin’ and cosmic debris psycho-philopsophy aside for now, as it should be, there are going to be some hard and fast decisions awaiting each and every one of you as the supersystem deliquesces through the white Christian racist from the countryside nouvelle ancien regime (Jeff Sessions as Attorney General? So then, why not the bones of Terry Schiavo as White House Press secretary?)

First, and last, will be how you will die. As in death- how you will die to put an end to your life? The question is not how you are going to shuffle through your next years of breath-worthy living – that’s going to take a good deal of furtive adjustments to the usual, since any rational person can see the darkness and violence of just contending towards sanity within a remorseless neoliberal fascist anti-politics that has no agreeable terminus to any of its accelerating social crises. What work awaits you, to take you away from your knowledge of climate catastrophe, ocean pollution and acidification, economic inequality, the bestiality of mediated human social communication, and bad fast food? Good luck finding the reality-canceling white noise machine of your received cultural inclination.

Death, though – that’s a real human right, or it should be. One of religion’s worst effects is to demand and increase the amount of meaningless physical and mental suffering that old people endure, all in the name of prolonging “life” in some tremulous misapprehension against the right of humans to control their own destinies. In the US and A, the nascent movement of Death with Dignity had a 2016 victory in Colorado, and is about to get approval in the District of Columbia. Soon other non-Confederate states will have laws on their books, including New York, possibly within the next year. Though the laws are imperfect, they at least permit an humanist death of one’s own choosing, with a focus on sparing your family and friends the ghastly specter of your pointless suffering.

You can look forward to that, at least, unlike the earlier generations dying under the maleficent rule of the religion-mad that had your ancestral poor wretches lying in wrack and ruin before their certain prolonged death. You’ll be able to say goodbye to all that, and say goodbye with your loved ones by your side. What a humane future for your end, brought to you by courageous and magnificent humanists now working in all 50 states.